I am the Executive Vice President and Executive Producer at iRacing.com and I have been here since the company started.  I was previously employed at Papyrus Racing games were I started in QA in 2000 and ended when the doors closed in 2004 as the Producer.  I figure I will start this blog and put some thoughts I have in here from time to time for those that would like to read them. 

I figure I will just ramble off some random memories I have from Papyrus that people may find interesting.  I figure this stuff can come out now because it can’t hurt that company any longer!

I was driving Jeff Burton’s car on the box cover art screenshot for NASCAR 4 and current iRacing employees Jay Taylor, Greg Hill and Kevin Iannarelli are all also driving cars in the image.  The NR2002 and 2003 box cover art was done by an artist.  If you look very closely at the NR2003 cover you can see the Winston Cup Logo on the car which was mistakenly included by a mix-up in artwork by the marketing manager at VUG.  There is also something else wrong with the car which I can’t remember right now.

We did in fact begin to port the PC code to the consoles and we planned on using this project to get GPL 2 made.  I believe that we had settled on the 1972 year to base that product on before it got canned by the publisher.  Greg Hill actually had the Nurburgring, Monza, Monoco, Zandvoort, Kyalami, Spa and Mexico converted and the code was running on the xbox before it was canceled. Our great Shawn Nash was the one that actually did all this work.  That man is probably the smartest guy I know and has yet to be stumped by any project we have thrown at him.

I created all the Darrell Waltrip track tours in NR2002 along with the driving guides by Dave Kaemmer.  This project took me 8 months to complete which required me listening to Waltrip and Dave for 8+ hours a day.  I have a very difficult time listening to the Fox broadcasts of NASCAR and occasionally have to be restrained from going after Dave if he talks too long…..

When we created NR2003 we pretty much knew that it was going to be our last NASCAR product at Papyrus.  My primary mission was to get Dave the tire data from Goodyear that he always wanted to have to implement into his models.  We got very lucky that Mike Stackpole and Greg Stucker at Goodyear decided to help us out.  We actually had to prove to Mike that we would not be wasting his time by going into great detail on how our model worked.  Only after he knew that we had a proper model did he decide to give us data.  I won’t name names, but he rejected another company looking for data for this exact reason.

When word came down that we had an opportunity to do one last patch for NR2003 I was able to convince the late Rich Reilly (Papyrus GM and one of the kindest and most genuine guys I have known in my life) to let me secretly sneak the additional three physics models into NR2003.  Grant Reeve literally had a week to create these physics models with whatever data we could get our hands on.  The PTA physics model is actually loosely based on the red GT1 Corvette which I have posted a picture of. 

Rich also let me start the infamous Project Wildfire group as a final thank you to all our loyal customers.  I started this group and had these physics models made because I wanted the community to have a legal way to create something for themselves to contribute to the community.  This group was entirely on their own after I put them together and we told them how to find the physics models.  I knew most of the guys as they had been former employees, contractors or testers for us. The two guys I did not know were John Hughes and Kevin Combs.  I had seen their work on a truck mod they did for NASCAR Heat that was impressive so I emailed John and started a conversation with him.  John told me he would only want to join the team if he could bring along Kevin.  So basically, Kevin should be buying beers for John every time they get together because he along with Brian Simpson, Jay Taylor and John have been happily employed with iRacing for the past 4+ years!

My last little nugget of information is going to be out of left field.  In the year after we released the final patch for NR2003 we started developing console design concepts and actual technology demos.  One concept that actually went pretty far down the design road was a title called Black Ice.  We had a pretty detailed design document created and it got far enough that I actually got to pitch it to the marketing people in Paris.  We also had a cross platform technology demo for a Karting game that was actually a lot of fun.  I am not talking about shifter carts, I am talking about a Crash Bandicoot and Simpsons arcade like karting game.  The final demo ended up being a Simpsons version that had incredibly fun physics.  Our goal with this demo was to show VUG that we could do other projects outside of pure simulations even though this is really what we wanted to do.  We knew that we had to do both if we were going to survive but felt we could make a console game fun by making a decent physics model.  The demo was presented to VUG who ultimately rejected it because they had another studio doing karting games at the time but they did admit our demo was more fun than the actual approved project.  It was not long after this that the doors closed at Papyrus which ultimately proved to be a blessing in disguise.

If more Papyrus memories come to me I will post them or if anyone has any question about those days I will try and answer them.  I also have some interesting ideas for some posts in the future.

Steve